Not yet, there are a few bugs i need to squash before I’m ready for the next round of testing.

sorta ^^

it is a well known industry standard design philosophy.

“At the time, a console title cost something in the realm of $100 in today’s dollars (or over €85-95), which made each game purchase an investment requiring long consideration and thoughtful planning. At that price, every game needed to last weeks, if not months, to justify the investment. Most games achieved this with the good old “Nintendo-hard” philosophy: Brutal challenges make a relative dearth of original content last longer.”

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/09/too-much-of-a-good-thing-mourning-the-slow-death-of-the-retail-game-store/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_hard

Corporate greed has killed all of my favorite mmos, and every new mmo that comes out is further down the spiral.

So I decided to make my own damn game, a mashup of my top 5 favorite defunct mmos. Base gameplay/progression/dynamic events from Tabula Rasa, Star Wars Galaxies crafting/building, Firefall jumping/gliding/thumping, the mechs from Exteel, and the territory control map from Planetside 1.

It’s 100% a shameless asset flip, and currently jank af, but pretty fun at the moment.

And it was based on an arma mod from 2012.

When an MMO launches it normally has little content and uses difficulty to pad playtime, especially subscription MMOs like WOW and pre-one tamriel ESO. Typically an mmo reduces difficulty of old content over time, when new content becomes available.

I do agree that the effect is much more pronounced the more popular a game is. LoTRO at least added some of the overworld challenge back with an optional difficulty slider after community backlash, and I’m not sure that a less niche game would have bothered.

IDK. I skipped horse archers in my latest dark elves playthrough of total war warhammer 3, because they are so trash. No shields + large targets means they die really easy to missile fire, And since you can’t use a longbow on horseback they lack the range to engage other archer units without taking a few volleys first.

Basically they are only good for fighting factions like undead that that have no ranged units.

Games made in the early 90’s were made for cartridges and floppy disks with limited memory and couldn’t contain a lot of content so difficulty was used to increase playtime.

Aye. Like all design paradigms, there are places where they can be useful or can be used to achieve a certain feel.

I actually hate “choose from a menu combat” but have thought of a few cases where it would make sense - for example a Legend of Galactic Heroes style space warfare game based on hyper-realistic combat between massive fleets of 20,000+ ships each, which according to lore, line up in nice neat firing lines and shoot at each other for 12+ hours until one side has won via attrition. There is no way to simulate that in real time and be fun, and the ranges at which combat happens in deep space means that there is basically literally no room for maneuvering once the battle has began…

This is actually a few different design paradigms you are talking about.

The first is the exploration map transitioning into a battle map during encounters. The second is randomly spawning encounters. The third is forcing players to fight those encounters. Games like Zelda 2 had a exploration map transition into a battlemap, but the encounters are visible on the exploration map and could be avoided if you want so they were never forced or random. On the other hand games like Shining in the Darkness had exploration and battle on the same map; there was no transitions and the view perspective did not change, the game just randomly forced you to fight encounters while you walked around. Then you have something like Vermintide 2 which is a realtime first person action rpg/shooter where random monsters are spawned in at random times on random places on the map to attack you, but the monsters only spawn out of sight in places you are not looking at, and you are not forced to fight them.

IMO battle transitions and forced encounters are outdated mechanics designed around the technical limitations of 8 bit era systems, while random encounters are a great way to improve exploration and overall replay value of a game.

Wipeout is my favorite racing series. Jet Moto was pretty cool too.

every beth game has always had game breaking bugs on release

Try Kenshi.

deleted by creator

The game was a ripoff of phantasy star online 2 except with less slutty costumes, which is the main reason people play phantasy star online 2. The game was always going to be DOA.

have you tried kenshi?

Tabula Rasa. It was a first/third person sci fi mmo shooter/rpg with craftable mechs, It lasted for a bit more then a year before it shut down, and no private servers have ever been created.

Gundam : Universal Century Online. Picture Star Wars Galaxies with combined arms mecha warfare. Start on foot, buy a jetpack, mine some ore, built a tank/jet/mech, fight in the war. It lasted about as long as tabula rasa before it shut down. It currently has no private server.

Firefall. First/third person sci fi mmo shooter/rpg with craftable mech suits. bla blah, shut down no private server ever created.

tl/dr: I want a new mech mmo. Or even just to be able to play my old favorite mecha mmos.

The Morrowind expansion for Elder Scrolls Online could have been the greatest thing ever, if they had just straight remade TES3 in the ESO engine, following the failed Neverine that literally existed in lore during the era ES was set in. Instead they just released an expansion set in morrowind with a story that had nothing to do with tes3’s storyline.